Within an organization, such as a research facility, governmental agency or any general office setting, a local area network (LAN) is provided for connecting personal computers located throughout the organization to enable data sharing between the personal computers. Such local area networks are well known and require a dedicated set of wiring connections to interconnect each personal computer to the LAN.
Within such an organization, it is also common to connect a plurality of telephones together into a local public branch exchange (PBX) telephone network, so that it is not necessary to provide each person in the organization with their own private phone line, which would be quite expensive. Such local PBX telephone networks also require a dedicated set of wiring connections to interconnect each telephone to the local PBX telephone network.
The need for two separate sets of wirings, one for connecting only personal computers and the other for connecting only telephones can be quite costly in terms of installation fees, maintenance fees and equipment costs.
Further, new multimedia personal computers now contain integrated equipment, such as microphones and loudspeakers, for performing standard telephone functions, such as allowing the user to speak into the microphone for voice communication with a remote party. If such a multimedia personal computer is connected to the LANs discussed above, it would still be necessary to have a separate telephone. That is, the local PBX telephone network requires a special telephone to be connected thereto so these multimedia personal computers cannot be connected to the local PBX telephone network. Therefore, these new multimedia personal computers cannot be used for voice communication purposes with the present state of networking technology.
The prior art EtherPhone.RTM. network of Xerox.RTM. Corporation enables local telephone voice communication (i.e., calls originating from and destined to a location within the organization) to take place over a dedicated LAN by using packet-switching technology. However, any calls originating from or destined to a location outside of the organization must take place over a local PBX telephone network with its separate wiring network as discussed above. Further, data communications require a third set of wiring (another LAN). Thus, the EtherPhone network involves three sets of wirings and suffers from the above problems associated with such added complexity.